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Currently it costs the city more than $13 million annually in electricity use and maintenance to operate its street lights using the sodium lights, and officials say the light isn't the greatest.

As the lights are converted residents will notice a lighter, silvery hue from the new units, a change from the pinkish-orange light produced by the sodium lamps. Seattle City Light says the new lights focus light instead of radiating it in all directions.

With older lights "you have some spillage," said City Light spokesman Scott Thomsen, while "an LED gives you a very crisp light footprint -- here's where the light's going and here's where it stops."

The city began testing LEDs three years ago as a pilot project, first near City Light's North Service Center and then on Capitol Hill and in West Seattle and South Park neighborhoods.

Increasing numbers of manufacturers are producing LEDs, which use semiconductor chips to convert electrical current into light. More than 100 different fixture types were analyzed and 9 were picked for the tests.

The tests were not announced in advance. Neighborhood leaders said many people didn't notice the change but some residents didn't like the more intense LED light produced by some LEDs, Thomsen said.

"One of the objections I've heard about the new lights is that they are too bright at night for residents with windows facing the street," said Jen Power, president of the Capitol Hill Community Club. "Also, some find the blue-white light a little unsettling - it can make people look a little corpselike."

Residents were more accepting when the city tested a "warmer" hue similar to moonlight, Thomsen said. "That's just a feel that works for people," he said. City Light said that, in surveys, 85 percent of respondents approved of the new lights, which don't distort colors as much as current lights.

"I saw things posted on our List Serve and people mentioning that 'Did you see how much lighter it is on my street or where I drive or walk?' " said Dagmar Cronn, president of the South Park Neighborhood Council. "I only heard one negative, from somebody who felt the lights on her block were coming in (her) bedroom window and it upset her…it was a higher-level of light than had been on that street before."

Power also thinks Capitol Hill residents also like the idea of the new lights. "If it uses less energy and lasts longer, that's great," she said. "If they burn out less often, they might be able to replace the ones that do burn out more quickly."

The city this week announced its four-year plans to begin replacing just under half its sodium-vapor lights with LEDs in residential areas. This year it will install LEDs in 5,000 fixtures between Denny Way and 65th Street. Other residential area lights will be converted by 2014.

Late this year City Light will test LEDs on lights illuminating commercial areas and arterial streets, where lighting may need to be brighter for drivers traveling at higher speeds than they do near homes.

There's no schedule for converting lights on those areas but those conversions can be planned depending on what's found in the next tests. The price tag for converting commercial areas could be as much as $50 million more unless hardware pricing becomes more competitive and prices drop as officials think.

LED fixtures cost almost three times as much as sodium-vapor lights but the LEDs last nearly three times as long and the savings in maintenance costs are "where the real dollars are," said Edward Smalley, City Light's manager of streetlight engineering.

"At a minimum of 12 years of life (for each LED), you're saving $2.4 million a year (and) at a $23 million projected cost to install these lights, by year 10 you've paid for them," City Light spokesman Thomsen predicted.

Delays in fixing burned out or damaged street lights have irritated more than one city dweller. Will longer-lasting LEDs allow City Light to do faster repairs or replacements? "If you have fewer to get to you expect to be able to…improve your response," Thomsen agreed but before the conversion is completed "it's too early to answer that question."

City Light got into the LED game early enough to attract the attention of the U.S. Department of Energy, which contributed $1 million toward the utility's first year of LED installation work.

The department also set up a national lighting consortium to promote installation of LEDs in other communities' lighting systems. The group, to be led by City Light, will also act as a clearinghouse of information about the best hardware, public feedback and evaluation of results. Smalley, the City Light manager, will serve as the consortium's director.

The Department said cities' plans nationwide to convert street lights called for an effort to share information.

Solid-state streetlights offer another "greener" energy alternative but they are "still a relatively new development and have no long-term operating history," the Energy Department's website said. "Substantial risk exists for making large-scale mistakes …"